DIY Polished Concrete Floors or Hire a PRO?

Polished concrete floors are gaining popularity all the time. Unfortunately, the knowledge needed for creating a beautiful finish via polishing concrete, is not being well imparted to the DIY crowd. The equipment needed is also not readily available. Even when you can get your hands on it, it requires weeks of training and years of experience to make a concrete floor shine using grinding and polishing equipment and techniques.Polishing concrete requires a extremely heavy head weight machine, chemical processes best left to pros and a keen eye and touch for problems that present themselves later in the process, when it’s too late to do anything about it, other than starting over.The most common mistake we see with DIY polishers and inexperienced contractors is, the “swirl mark devastation.”

Polishing is the process of scratching a surface with progressively finer and finer grits until the area is so scratched on a microscopic level that it reflects light in all directions.

When a inexperienced personpolishes a floor, they may not see that the tooling, techniques or equipment they are using may be causing scratches that they won’t notice until very late in the process. Once these scratches start to show their ugly little faces, the stage reached in polishing is far too fine to remove these scratches, leading the operator to have to start over.

It is common to hear people say, polishing concrete is simple, you just rent a machine at the hardware store and some sanding pads and polish it. This not only doesn’t work, it will make a professionals job even more costly should the DIY person need to hire someone to fix it.

Another advantage to a PRO vs a DIY:Pros have dust collection equipment. If you are DIYing, you’ll most certainly find yourself in a dust cloud.

The Various Types Of Polished Concrete (and their close cousins, the exposed aggregate clear coat floor)The term "polished concrete" gets thrown around a lot. Let's look at what polished concrete really…